Some books console. Others disturb the pattern. I have been thinking about a line from Gabriel Josipovici, offered almost casually at the end of an essay on Paul and the Book of Romans: “the only thing that can truly heal and console us is not the voice of consolation but the voice of reality.”
It does not offer comfort. It offers clarity, or something like it. A kind of exposure. Josipovici traces that voice through the Bible, not as doctrine but as narrative: stories that refuse the balm of resolution, stories that do not explain. And I think of Kafka, aged twenty, sitting at a table after soft bread and family lunch, writing a few uncertain lines about a prison corridor only to have his uncle dismiss them with a glance and a shrug: “The usual stuff.” Kafka writes:
…with one thrust I had been banished from society … and even within the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.
It is hard to think of a better origin story for a modern writer. That sense of being sent out, not in anger, but in indifference. And of trying, with sentences, to warm the cold.
That is the tone Josipovici returns to again and again in What Ever Happened to Modernism? Not as lament, but as recognition: that the work of art today, if it is to matter at all, must resist the desire to reassure. It must remain alive to doubt. Not simple, not whole, but fractured and aware of its own fracture.
There is a passage from Wordsworth that Josipovici quotes, A Night Piece, and I keep returning to it. The sky covered in cloud, the moon faint, the traveller’s gaze earthward. Then the sudden break, and for a moment: the clear moon, the silent stars, the dark vault turning.
The wind is in the tree, / But they are silent; / still they roll along / Immeasurably distant…
It is that tension between clarity and disappearance that animates the reading I most want to do now. Not reading for guidance, but for grounding.
>Dear Anthony,Thank you for this summary look and for the blogging you have done to post excerpts. I shall have to look this one up!(By the way, agree absolutely on To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, I would add Absalom, Absalom! and Mrs. Dalloway to the mix [among others]}.shalom,Steven
>Steven – I shall have to read Mrs. Dalloway again soon. I enjoyed it very much but it did not have quite the impact of To the Lighthouse.I have had many "blows to the head" but only three this year.Thank you.
>Steven, hello.Thanks for writing on Josipovici, and particularly appreciated is the level-headedness of your post, so unlike the sensational newspaper stories concerning a few select excerpts from a longer work. His fiction exemplifies interest in form (as Gilbert Sorrentino said, "form is content") and also a deeply humane sensibility. Not often found together.You talk about blows to the head. If I can share, some of mine were Henry Miller's _Tropic of Cancer_, WIlliam Gaddis' _The Recognitions_ and Blaise Cendrars' _Moravagine, but not all in the one year. 2010 has been good for you.Jeff
>Jeff – Thank you for your comments. I imagine Josipovici was surprised to elicit such interest, albeit misplaced. Perhaps it helped sell a few additional copies, however unwittingly.I read Tropic of Cancer many years ago. I must look it out again some time. The Recognitions is on my shelves, one day perhaps.
>Anthony, I could see how Josipovici's study might provide a blow to the head for a fellow if read at the right time and with the right good fortune. I was inspired by much of it and look forward to pursuing some of its leads as time goes on. Anyway, enjoyed your enthusiastic post.